ABSTRACT
Jonathan Lowe’s (1996) account of persons, selves, mental or psychological acts, states and their objects relies on his ontology of substances and tropes (modes): persons are selves, that is, simple, mental or psychological substances which are the bearers of tropes, mental or psychological. Mental or psychological substances are not however to be identified with Cartesian selves. For Lowe’s selves stand in a unique and intimate relation to their living bodies. I outline an alternative: persons are complex substances, unities of tropes; no person is a self; every self or soul is a complex substance, a unity of tropes; the tropes making up a person are mental; the tropes making up a self are psychological and bodily. Persons, on this view, are indeed mental but are not Cartesian substances because of the unique and intimate and relation in which they stand to bodies and souls or selves. I then consider the extent to which Lowe’s view of the relation between persons and their bodies is compatible with the alternative.
